Who Gives Expert Advice? Studying Experts Involved in Swedish Policymaking

• In Event: Outsider Ideas and Elite Policymaking

Abstract

Experts play a central role in national and international policy-making processes and their influence has been steadily increasing over time. Despite the expansion of their influence, we have very little systematic information about who the experts are and what social backgrounds they have. In this study, I hope to bridge this gap by providing detailed information about the backgrounds of experts involved in the national policymaking process in Sweden. My study uses administrative data that contains detailed information about the full adult population in Sweden, including information about the parental class background of each individual. Within this data, I can identify the relevant experts and a number of relevant reference groups, including the entire voting age population, national parliamentarians, as well as the population that experts are typically drawn from: university professors. This allows me not only to measure how representative the experts are of the total population, but also if they are more or less representative than elected legislators and academics in general. Preliminary findings suggest that experts not only have a significantly lower likelihood of having working-class parents compared to the average citizen, but also compared to the average parliamentarian. This is mainly due to the fact that the pool of which experts are drawn from primarily consists of university professors, who are very unlikely to have a working-class background.

Author

• Rebecca Eriksson, Uppsala University